A Triumph of Modern Medicine

 

by Pa Rock

Aging Citizen Journalist

For the past six weeks or so I have been visiting an array of physicians regarding a sudden drop in my pulse rate that lasted several days back in mid-October.  Since that spate of doctor visits and some changes in medication, the condition seems to have generally corrected itself, but the cardiologist did put me through a couple of tests to get a clearer read on the current situation with my 76-year-old ticker:  an echocardiogram and a chemical stress test.

Medical tests are normally performed to see how something is functioning and are not intended to be corrective measures in and of themselves, so I was surprised when the chemical stress whose purpose was to photograph my heart under varying conditions fixed an issue with my arm which I had suffered with for more than two years.

I fell and broke my right arm in May of 2020 in what was a totally avoidable accident.  It broke in a straight  line just below the shoulder.  I went to physical therapy afterward and eventually regained full use of the arm.  Two years later, in February of 2022, I again fell, that time on a slick incline that was covered with a black frost that I hadn't detected.   I broke my left arm in exactly the same place and manner as happened two years earlier with the right arm.  I again went to physical therapy, but that time when I "graduated" I could tell that I was still somewhere short of being back to normal.  I tried to use the arm as aggressively as I could at home, but, being the left arm of a right-handed person, it did not get the same amount of attention as its right counterpart.    My range-of-motion never returned to normal and there were certain tasks, like taking a shower, that required more effort than before the accident.  

I told myself that I was just getting old and would have to live with it, and when my doctor would ask for updates on my aches and pains I would either not mention the arm or minimize the occasional pain and inconvenience.  I was not in the mood to repeat a physical therapy regime that had been ineffective  the first time.

Fast forward to the chemical stress test.  The procedure involves lying on a narrow table and being wheeled into a long white tube similar to an MRI tube.  The technician putting me through the procedure told me to put my arms above my head - which I did, resting my hands on top of my head.  "Oh no," he said, "Stretch those arms so we don't catch your elbows on the tube as you go in.  I was still wearing my windbreaker, and the shoulders of that garment got especially tight as I raised my arms.  After I was finally situated, most uncomfortably with pain in my shoulders, the attendant looked down and said, "Remain as still as you can while you are in the tube.  I will be back in five minutes."

"Huh?"  Five minutes!  But I managed to do it, and when he finally returned it took almost as much time and effort to lower my arms as it did to climb off of the skinny table.  Then I was sent out for a mandatory "fatty" breakfast meal and came back to do the follow-up.  Soon I was on the table again and being slid into the tube - and I had forgotten to take off the windbreaker, so my shoulders were immediately back in pain mode - but I persevered, heroically and silently.  This time he told me that he would be back in three-and-a-half minutes.  (Time off for good behavior?)

The long and short of it is that by the time I drove fifty miles back to the house, my entire left arm seemed to have lost the low-grade pain that I had become so used to over the past two years.  Probably just my imagination, I thought.  But that night I woke to find myself sleeping on my left side, and old preference that had been missing from my sleep routine for a long time, and the next morning I found that my range-of-motion was nearly complete, and showering was much easier than it had previously been.

The heart test had fixed my arm.

Modern medicine is miraculous!